A Social History Timeline: Universal Human Rights

This is a personal lifelong teaching, learning and research tool created by Maureen Flynn-Burhoe. References are provided as much as possible. It is neither comprehensive or complete. It will always be a partial snapshot. It is shared within the spirit of the creative commons.
Sub-themes include selected events in the histories of major religions, indigenous peoples, Nunavut, Canada, women, the media, democracy and labour.

563 BCE Origins of Buddhism with the birth of Siddhartha Gautama
450 BCE Publication of ancient Roman laws, the Twelve Tables
400 BCE Plato’s Republic
106 Diplomatic ties are established between the Chinese and the Persians.
250 The prophet Mani Paraclete (210-275) from Western Persia founded the Manichaeism religion which attempted to unite all existing religions, particularly Zoroastrianism and Christianity. The Manichaean apocalyptic cosmology doctrine declared the existence of a Dualism within the universe, which was like as a battlefield between two equal forces of good and evil, Jehovah (Creator) and Satan (Created). The Dualist doctrine was widely accepted late Middle Ages.
c. 370 Augustine lived near Carthage, which was in in the Roman state of Numidia (present day Tunisia and Algeria.) Augustine read Greek philosophers, such as Plotinus and adopted his neo-Platonic thought. He attempted to organize an Athenian-like gathering of philosophers and intellectuals who were seekers of truth.
c. 370 The Huns invade Europe from the Central Asian steppe.
410 Rome fell to Arian Christians, a heretical sect. Augustine wrote of this in his Exegesis (critiques) of Genesis, Romans, and other books of the Bible. In Confessions, the first autobiography in Western history, Augustine wrote about memory, will, and time. The City of God examines why Rome fell to Arian Christians (a heretical sect) in 410. It contains observations and commentary which are still relevant today, including a section which some believe is the beginning of the concept of a ‘just war’. He wrote voluminously works that were adopted by the Roman Catholic religion.
430. Hippo, (Carthage) was surrounded by Vandals.
476 Fall of the Western Roman Empire
565 Emperor Justinian I’s Corpus Juris Civilis (Body of Civil Law) is a classic illustration of Natural Law doctrine combining the best of classical Greco-Roman law with Christianity. The code includes honest living, inflict no harm on others and give everyone his due.
570 The birth of Muhammad.
618 The Tang dynasty is established in China.
625 Through the Constitution of Medina the clans accepted Muhammad as the Prophet of God and formed an alliance, or federation forming a political community. Non-Muslims such as Jews and Christians were members of the community as protected people, as long as they conformed to its laws. This established a precedent for the treatment of subject peoples during the later conquests. Christians and Jews, upon payment of a yearly tax, were allowed religious freedom and, while maintaining their status as non-Muslims, were associate members of the Muslim state.
629 Mohammad reentered and conquered Mecca without bloodshed and in a spirit of tolerance which established an ideal for future conquests.
632 Death of the Prophet Mohammad in Mecca marks the beginning of the expansion of the Arab Muslim Empire.
636 Muslims Caliphs consolidated the support of the tribes within the Arabian Peninsula and subsequently funneled their energies against the powerful empires of the East: the Sassanians in Persia and the Byzantines in Syria, Palestine, and Egypt; extended Islam’s temporal rule over Syria, Egypt, Iraq, and Persia. The Muslim state had extended its sway over all of Syria and blunted the power of the Byzantines. The Byzantine ruler Heraclius had rejected the letter from Mohammad. The Muslim state administered the conquered territories with a tolerance almost unheard of in that age. At Damascus, the Muslim leader assured Christians and Jews that their persons, churches and properties would be respected. Throughout the Byzantine Empire, already weakened by religious dissension, Muslims gained power by offering religious tolerance to Jews and Christians. Muslim leaders protected languages and cultures in countries they controlled.
680-740 Shantarakshita was an influential Buddhist philosopher of a syncretic school combining Madhyamaka and Yogachara doctrines and contributing to the last flowering age of Buddhism in India.
657-61 The establishment of the Arabic Umayyad Caliphate in Damascus and the origin of the Sunni-Shi’ite split in Islam. At Siffen near the Euphrates, a major schism divided Moslems into two groups Sunnis or Sunnites and the Shi’is (also called Shi’ites or Shi’ah) that continues to divide Moslems today. Iran is mainly Shi’ites while Iraq is primarily Sunnites.
713 Muslims expanded control over vast regions of Asia, Africa and Europe. They passed into Spain, defeated the Visigoths, and by 713 had reached Narbonne in France. In the next decades, raiding parties continually made forays into France and in 732 reached as far as the Loire Valley, only 170 miles from Paris. There, at the Battle of Tours, or Poitiers, the Arabs were finally turned back by Charles Martel. The religious motivations of the early Caliphs was tarnished by desires for political and economic expansion. Moslems were not unified as they were in the early years following Mohammad’s death.
724-43 During the reign of the Umayyad caliph Hisham, the Arab empire reached its greatest extent. The Syrian Umayyads buiilt some of the most beautiful existing buildings in the Muslim world the Umayyad Mosque in Damascus, the Dome of the Rock in Jerusalem, and the lovely country palaces in the deserts of Syria, Jordan, and Iraq. They also organized a bureaucracy able to cope with the complex problems of a vast and diverse empire, and made Arabic the language of government. The Umayyads, furthermore, encouraged such writers as ‘Abd Allah ibn al-Muqaffa’ and ‘Abd al-Hamid ibn Yahya al-Katib, whose clear, expository Arabic prose has rarely been surpassed.
740-790 Kamalashila was an influential Buddhist philosopher of a syncretic school combining Madhyamaka and Yogachara doctrines and contributing to the Last flowering of Buddhism in India.
759-80 The Uighurs converted to Manichaeism under Khan Mei-yu.
800–1100s Turkish (Ottoman?) Muslims invaded India
786: “Harun al-Rashid was Abbasids caliphate in 786 in the Golden Age of Islam. The Golden Age was a period of unrivaled intellectual activity in all fields: science, technology, and (as a result of intensive study of the Islamic faith) literature – particularly biography, history, and linguistics. Persian miniature depicts students with a teacher of astronomy – one of the sciences to which scholars of the Golden Age made great contributions. ‘Abbasid writers also developed new a genres of literature such as adab, the embodiment of sensible counsel, sometimes in the form of animal fables; a typical example is Kalilah wa-Dimnah, translated by Ibn al-Muqaffa’ from a Pahlavi version of an Indian work. Writers of this period also studied tribal traditions and wrote the first systematic Arabic grammars. During the Golden Age Muslim scholars also made important and original contributions to mathematics, astronomy, medicine, and chemistry. They collected and corrected previous astronomical data, built the world’s first observatory, and developed the astrolabe, an instrument that was once called “a mathematical jewel.” In medicine they experimented with diet, drugs, surgery, and anatomy, and in chemistry, an outgrowth of alchemy, isolated and studied a wide variety of minerals and compounds. Important advances in agriculture were also made in the Golden Age. The ‘Abbasids preserved and improved the ancient network of wells, underground canals, and waterwheels, introduced new breeds of livestock, hastened the spread of cotton, and, from the Chinese, learned the art of making paper, a key to the revival of learning in Europe in the Middle Ages. The Golden Age also, little by little, transformed the diet of medieval Europe by introducing such plants as plums, artichokes, apricots, cauliflower, celery, fennel, squash, pumpkins, and eggplant, as well as rice, sorghum, new strains of wheat, the date palm, and sugarcane. Photo: Muslim scientists developed the astrolabe, an instrument used long before the invention of the sextant to observe the position of celestial bodies.”
800 – Muslims built a superior civilization in Andalusia, southern Spain. Reigning with wisdom and justice, they treated Christians and Jews with tolerance, with the result that many embraced Islam. They also improved trade and agriculture, patronized the arts, made valuable contributions to science, and established Cordoba as the most sophisticated city in Europe.
861 Turks once used mainly for military protection, began to dominate the Muslim caliphate. Under the Turks, Central authority began to decline.
900 In c.900 the Moorish city of Cordoba, southern Spain, had a population of 500,000, compared to about 38,000 in Paris. According to the chronicles of the day, the city had 700 mosques, some 60,000 palaces, and 70 libraries – one reportedly housing 500,000 manuscripts and employing a staff of researchers, illuminators, and book binders. Cordoba also had some 900 public baths, Europe’s first street lights.
900 The Jews arrived in Prague as merchants building a rich, cultured community in spite of centuries of persecution including confinement within a walled section of the city. Jews were not persecuted by those Muslim traders who followed Mohammad’s teachings of tolerance.
906 The end of the Tang dynasty in China.
940 The conversion of the Qarakhanids and Uighurs from Buddhism to Islam under Satuq Bughra Khan. Manchaen religion dies out?
986 The Russians, in search of a religion, contact Muslim missionaries from Khwarezm, but decide not to adopt Islam.
988 The conversion of the Russians to Eastern Orthodox Christianity.
1000 A small pocket of Christian resistance began to grow into a Christian Reconquest which was successful due to the lack of unity among Muslims.
1000? “The famous Muslim theologian Al-Ghazali, whose greatest work, the Revival of the Sciences of Religion, was a triumph of Sunni theology taught for a time at the nizamiyah schools at Baghdad and at Nishapur. Nizam-al-Mulk was the patron of the Muslim poet and astronomer ‘Umar al-Khayyam (Omar Khayyam), whose verses, as translated by Edward FitzGerald in the nineteenth century, have become as familiar to English readers as the sonnets of Shakespeare.”
1100s Attar, a Persian Sufi wrote his masterpiece The Conference of the Birds, described as an epic allegory of the seeker’s journey to God. All the birds of the world convene to choose a king. German novelist Hermann Hesse’s “Journey to the East” has been compared to this poem (Attar 1100s).
1095 Pope Urban II called for a truce among European rulers between the oppositional factions of the Eastern Orthodox and Western Christian churches, to aid the Eastern Orthodox Byzantines against the Muslims urging them to take the Holy Land from the Muslims.
1187-1280s Moslem ruler Saladin counterattacked against the Crusaders. Saladin recaptured Jerusalem. The Europeans mounted a series of further crusading expeditions against the Muslims over the next hundred years or so, but the Crusaders never again recovered the initiative. Confined to the coast, they ruled small areas until their final defeat at the hands of the Egyptian Mamluks at the end of the thirteenth century.
1160- Persian poet Nizami Ganjavi (1141-1204), from Azerbaijan, in the southeastern region of the Caucasus Mountains, collected a number of folk versions of this originally Bedouin tale from the North Arabic tribe of Amir in western Saudi Arabia (7th century CE) and shaped them into a single narrative of more than 4,000 stanzas which has been compared for its beauty and depth to Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet (Maclean 2000). The Khamsa (Quintet), which includes “Layli and Majnun,” “Khusrau and Shirin,” and several other stories in verse. (Bashiri 2002). The story of Layli (Layla) and Majnun is the classic love tale of the Middle East which is also prized by Sufi mystics as a profound spiritual allegory of the soul’s search for and ultimate union with God.
1193 Moslems attacked and conquered Magadha, the heartland of Buddhism in India Buddhist Monasteries in India, like Nalanda, were destroyed.
1169 The English first arrived in Ireland.
1206 Chingiz Khan becomes khan of the Mongols.
1215–94 Mongol emperor, Kublai Khan Mongol founded the Chinese Yüan. The empire reached its greatest territorial extent with Kublai’s final defeat (1279) of the Sung dynasty of China; however, his campaigns against Japan, Myanmar, Vietnam, and Indonesia failed. He recruited men of all nations for his civil service, but only Mongols were permitted to hold the highest government posts. He promoted economic prosperity by rebuilding the Grand Canal, repairing public granaries, and extending highways. He fostered Chinese scholarship and arts. Although he favored Tibetan Buddhism (Lamaism), other religions (except Taoism) were tolerated. Kublai encouraged foreign commerce, and his magnificent capital at Cambuluc (now Beijing) was visited by several Europeans, notably Marco Polo, who described it. It was long thought to be the city Xanadu, featured in Coleridge’s poem Kubla Khan. ( Saunders 1988). China had four classes: The tiny privileged Mongolian minority; secondly, the se-mu jen (“persons with special status”), such confederates of the Mongols as Turks or Middle Eastern Muslims [Marco Polo may have been one of these?]; thirdly, the han-jen (northern Chinese); fourthly and lastly man-tzu, “southern barbarians”, the numerical majority which was ¾ of China from Sung China. There were also many slaves.
1209 The Muslim Uighurs, under Barchuq, submit to Mongol rule.
1207-1273 Jalal Al-Din Rumi, Afghani Muslim Philosopher, religious scholar, wrote the Mathnawi which highlights the various hidden aspects of Sufism, the relationship between God and man, man and man, and man with the worldly life. Rumi influenced literature, culture, metaphysics, philosophy in Central Asia and Islamic countries.
1215 Magna Carta (Great Britain)
1200 – 1400 Small Arab kingdoms flourished in the mountains of Andalusia, Spain. It was then that they created Granada and the Alhambra described as “the glory and the wonder of the civilized world.”
1238 The Alhambra, Spain was begun in 1238 by Muhammad ibn al-Ahmar who, to buy safety for his people when King Ferdinand of Aragon laid siege to Granada, once rode to Ferdinand’s tent and humbly offered to become the king’s vassal in return for peace.
1242 The Mongols stop their westward advance at the gates of Vienna.
1247 Beginning of Construction of Gothic style Strasbourg Cathedral.
1248 Al-Ahmar kept his promise to Spanish monarch, King Ferdinand of Aragon and helped Christians against Muslims in the siege of Seville in 1248. Over the years, what started as a fortress slowly evolved under Ibn al-Ahmar’s successors into a remarkable series of delicately lovely buildings, quiet courtyards, limpid pools, and hidden gardens. Later, after Ibn al-Ahmar’s death, Granada itself was rebuilt and became, as one Arab visitor wrote, “as a silver vase filled with emeralds.”
1290s Egyptian Marluks Muslims defeated the Christian Crusaders in the final expedition mounted by the Crusaders.
750s – 1250s? “The creation of the office of the vizier was only one of the innovations the ‘Abbasids brought to statecraft. Another was the development of the Umayyad postal system into an efficient intelligence service; postmasters in outlying provinces were the eyes and ears of the government and regular reports were filed with the central government on everything from the state of the harvest to the doings of dissident sects. Under the ‘Abbasids too a whole literature was created for the use and training of the clerical classes that had come into being. Since all government business was by now transacted in Arabic, manuals of correct usage were written for the instruction of non-Arabic speakers who had found government employment. There was also a vast literature on the correct deportment of princes, as well as anthologies of witty sayings and anecdotes with which to enliven one’s epistolary style. Trade flourished under the ‘Abbasids. Because Islamic rule unified much of the Eastern world, thus abolishing many boundaries, trade was freer, safer, and more extensive than it had been since the time of Alexander the Great. Muslim traders, consequently, established trading posts as far away as India, the Philippines, Malaya, the East Indies, and China.”
1220 “Genghis Khan leading the Mongols, a confederation of nomadic tribes, that had already conquered China, attacked the Muslims. In 1220 they took Samarkand and Bukhara. By mid-century they had taken Russia, Central Europe, northern Iran, and the Caucuses. In 1258, the Mongols invaded and devastated Baghdad. The Mongols adopted the religion of Islam but destroyed much of Islamic civilization. They killed or deported numerous scholars and scientists and destroyed libraries with their irreplaceable works. The result was to wipe out much of the priceless cultural, scientific, and technological legacy that Muslim scholars had been preserving and enlarging for some five hundred years.”
1260 The Mongol Yüan dynasty is established in China under Kublai Khan. 1215–94, Mongol emperor, founder of the Yüan dynasty of China. From 1251 to 1259 he led military campaigns in S China. He succeeded (1260) his brother Mongke (Mangu) as khan of the empire that their grandfather Jenghiz Khan had founded. The empire reached its greatest territorial extent with Kublai’s final defeat (1279) of the Sung dynasty of China; however, his campaigns against Japan (see kamikaze), Myanmar, Vietnam, and Indonesia failed. Kublai’s rule as the overlord of the Mongol empire was nominal except in Mongolia and China. He recruited men of all nations for his civil service, but only Mongols were permitted to hold the highest government posts. He promoted economic prosperity by rebuilding the Grand Canal, repairing public granaries, and extending highways. He fostered Chinese scholarship and arts. Although he favored Tibetan Buddhism (Lamaism), other religions (except Taoism) were tolerated. Kublai encouraged foreign commerce, and his magnificent capital at Cambuluc (now Beijing) was visited by several Europeans, notably Marco Polo, who described it. It was long thought to be the city Xanadu, featured in Coleridge’s poem Kubla Khan. Kublai’s name is also spelled Khubilai, Kubilai, Koublai, and Kubla. (See J. J. Saunders, The History of the Mongol Conquests (1971); M. Rossabi, Khubilai Khan (1988).)
1283 By the Middle Ages, major trading centers existed including the route past Chillon castle, Villeneuve near Geneva, Switzerland, residence of the counts of Savoy.
1357 In Prague, the Charles Bridge was built by King Charles IV over the Vltava River. The bridge is lined with 30 Baroque statues. To one side of the river is the old Jewish Town.
1300s Prague’s large Jewish community was confined to a walled-in section of town where like most Jews in Europe they were frequently under attack.
1348 A plague broke out in Villeneuve, Switzerland near Geneva. The town’s Jews were accused of plotting with Christian accomplices to poison the water supply, and large numbers of both were tortured in Chillon’s dungeons before being burned alive.
1389 In Prague 3,000 Jewish men, women and children were cornered and slaughtered in the infamous Easter massacre.
1403 Bedlam, London, England, was used as a hospital for patients with mental disorders.
1440 Gutenberg completed his wooden press which used metal moving type (de la Mare 1997).
1453 “Although the Crusades achieved no lasting results in terms of military conquest, they were important in the development of trade, and their long-range effects on Western society – on everything from feudalism to fashion – are inestimable. Ironically, they also put an end to the centuries-old rivalry between the Arabs and Byzantines. By occupying Constantinople, the capital of their Christian allies, in the Fourth Crusade, the Crusaders achieved what the Arabs had been trying to do from the early days of Islam. Although the Byzantine Empire continued until 1453, when Constantinople fell to the Ottoman Turks, it never recovered its former power after the Fourth Crusade, and subsisted only in the half-light of history during its remaining years.” For the West, however, the Crusaders’ greatest achievement was the opening of the eastern Mediterranean to European shipping. The Venetians and Genoese established trading colonies in Egypt, and luxury goods of the East found their way to European markets. In the history of the Middle Ages, this was far more important than ephemeral conquests. Control of the Eastern trade became a constantly recurring theme in later relations between the European countries and the East, and in the nineteenth century was to lead to widespread Western intervention.”
1455 Gutenberg completed work on his 42 Line Bible (de la Mare 1997).
1462 The attack on Mainz by soldiers of the Archbishop of Nassau, caused printers to flee the city and spread their skills around Europe (de la Mare 1997).
1490s The decline of the overland trade routes, including the Silk Road, due to a new emphasis on trade by sea marked the end of the first wave of globalization.
1482 In a trivial quarrel, the Muslim kingdom split into two hostile factions and, simultaneously, two strong Christian sovereigns, Ferdinand and Isabella, married and merged their kingdoms. As a result, Granada fell ten years later.
1492 Christopher Columbus, under King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella of Spain, first arrived in the heavily populated, peaceful, prosperous Island of Hispaniola, West Indies. On January 2, Ferdinand and Isabella ended Islamic rule of Spain. Catholic Spain conquered the Alhambra, the cultural summit of 15th century Muslim culture.
1497 “Vasco da Gama led a fleet of four Portuguese ships around Africa and in 1498 found a new sea route to India from Europe. Dutch, British, and French frigates and merchantmen followed and began establishing trading outposts along the shores of the Indian Ocean, eventually undercutting both Venetian shipping and the Mediterranean trade on which the Middle East had thrived for millennia. This new route would prove devastating for the Muslim traders who had provided the European countries with imports from the Far and Middle East through the Ottoman caravans.
1492-1542 Catholic Spaniards attracted by the gold of the West Indies cruelly killed, terrorized and destroyed native peoples, almost decimating the entire indigenous population. Eye witness Las Casa estimated the genocide of 15 million First Peoples of the West Indies. He estimated that only two hundred survived (Las Casas 1542).
1517 Martin Luther protested against the Catholic Church which heralded the beginning of the Protestant Reformation, a sixteenth-century religious movement.
1520-66 “The Muslim Ottoman Empire reached its peak in size and splendor under the sultan called Suleiman the Magnificent, who ruled from 1520 to 1566 and was known to the Turks as Suleiman the Law-Giver. But from the middle of the sixteenth century on the empire began to decline. This process got under way as the office of the Grand Vizier gradually assumed more power and indifferent sultans began to neglect administration.”
1542 Las Casas published the Brief Account of the Devastation of the Indies based on his eye-witness observations in the West Indies. Las Casa reported that the island of Cuba was almost completely depopulated. San Juan (Puerto Rico) and Jamaica were deserted and devastated. He compared the islands off northern Cuba to the lush gardens of the King of Seville. All the First Nations were killed or enslaved. One shipload of Natives escaped with the help of one Spanish Christian. The vast mainland was described as longer than the distance between Seville and Jerusalem. The First Nations were described as rational, prosperous, noble and peaceful. Las Casas described the motivation of the Spanish Catholics as the desire for gold (Las Casas 1542).
1520 Martin Luther was excommunicated from the Catholic Church for attacking papal authority.
1521 Martin Luther argued for justification by faith at the Diet of Worms rejecting the need for priests as intermediaries between God and man. This marked the beginning of the Protestant Reformation. Many princes adopted this doctrine.
1533 Rabelais integrated street language including folk humour, the carnivalesque and the grotesque mixed with Latin to parody the official worlds of religion — Roman Catholic Church — and state —and the Holy Roman Empire (AGO 2000; Rabelais 1533 [1955]). Bakhtin compared the Russian Revolution to the early Renaissance through an analysis of the work of Rabelais. Inhabitants of Renaissance Europe as described in the literature of Rabelais (Bakhtin 1940 [1968]) experienced radical change during the time threshold between the dark ages and the higher renaissance.
1516-1555: Charles I ruled Spain and then the Holy Roman Emperor as Charles V during the Renaissance.
1555-1598 Philip II married Mary I of England Philip II. This is the period studied by Fernand Braudel.
1509-1547 Henry VIII ruled England.
1547-1553 Edward VI ruled England
1553-1558 Mary I ruled England
1558-1603 Elizabeth I ruled England
1515-1547 France: Francis I ruled France
1547-1584 Ivan the Terrible ruled Russia
1486-1519 Maximilian I was the Holy Roman Emperor
1519-1558 Charles V was the Holy Roman Emperor
1558-1564 Ferdinand I was the Holy Roman Emperor
1520-1566 Suleman Kanuni (the Lawgiver) was Sultan of the Ottoman Empire which expanded from Mecca, through northern Africa, to the Black Sea… During his rule trade routes prospered between London, the Rhine Valley, the Danube valley, Kiev, Algeria, Egypt and Istanbul.
1541 John Calvin established a puritan theocracy in Geneva.
1540 A confederacy of nations was formed in North American called The League of Iroquois composed of Seneca, Mohawk, Onondaga, Oneida and Cayuga. The governing council of the confederacy made decisions on issues that affected all tribes and acted as arbitrator for inter-tribal affairs. Each tribe dealt with their domestic affairs without interference from the other confederate members (Daugherty 1982).
1545-63 Dark Ages in Europe with the Roman Catholic Church in control.
1545-7 The Catholic Church issued the decrees of the Council of Trent initiating the Catholic or Counter Reformation which included the censorship of books (1545-63). Those who violated the law stood being excommunicated. Britain from the 16th century regulated the press through licensing (Medialaw 2001).
1546-7 Charles V inspired by the Catholic Counter Reformation attacked the Protestant Princes.
1557 France in 1557 passed the death penalty for importing forbidden books: “experience has shown the king of France how prejudicial to the state is the liberty of the press (Medialaw 2001).”
1530-36 Swiss patriot and historian François de Bonnivard supported the revolt of Geneva against Charles III of Savoy, who imprisoned him from 1519 to 1521. He was again imprisoned from 1530 to 1536 in the castle of Chillon, romanticized in Lord Byron’s poem “Prisoner of Chillon.” Released by the Bernese, he later became a Protestant. Geneva honored him with a pension. His chronicle of Geneva was first published in 1831 (Bonnivard 1560) See also Byron and Henry James’ Daisy Miller.
1576 Martin Frobisher, attempted to find the Northwest Passage. He encountered Inuit on Resolution Island. Five sailors jumped ship and became part of Inuit mythology. The homesick sailors tired of their adventure attempted to leave in a small vessel and vanished. Frobisher brought an unwilling Inuk to England.
1590s Legends claim that Prague’s Rabbi Judah Loew (1520-1609), one of the most respected and beloved sages in Eastern Europe built Golem a man of clay, to protect the persecuted members of the Jewish community of Prague.
1608 The creation of the Protestant Union (The Evangelic Union) an alliance of princes and city’s supported by Holland, England and France led by (Frederick IV) the Elector of Palatinate (TBC).
1609 The creation of the Catholic League led by Maximilian of Bavaria and aided by the Emperor. Bohemian Phase (1618-1625 commencement of hostilities)
1618 Ferdinand Hapsburg of Austria elected King of Bohemia and begins his Catholic reformatory policies.
1618 Bohemian Protestant rebels invade the royal palace in Prague throwing two of the Kings ministers out of the windows (known as the Defenestraition of Prague). Protestants call for help from the Duke of Savoy and Ferdinand of Austria.
1612 Habsburg Holy Roman Emperor [The Western Catholic Church associated with Rome] Rudolph II’s Imperial Court was cultural and spiritual centre of Central Europe in the late Renaissance on the eve of the Thirty Years War. Rudolph II collected Paintings, sculpture, alchemical experiments, astrological tables, herbal medicine, living beasts and bottled demons in a single point in time and space – his Kunstkammer or Cabinet of Curiosities. Tycho Brahe and his assistant Johannes Kepler changed the face of the heavens. [Note: Kepler’s model of the snowflake and the munitions pile?] Here artists such as Arcimboldo and Spranger wove eroticism, scholarship, and mysticism into complex allegorical masterpieces. “During the period of Rudolph II, the Jewish Town in Prague prospered. Jews could practice certain kind of handicrafts, open goldsmith shops and sell their goods outside the ghetto [?MFB] (Havel 1997).
1620 Johanne Kepler, a Protestant in the Upper Austrian Province defended his mother who was accused of being a witch during the witch hunts of 1615-6.
1618 The Thirty Years War began. The German and Austrian regions were devastated. Counter Reformation measures put pressure on Protestants who were persecuted.
1619 The last set of city walls in Europe enclosed the new settlement of Londonderry built by merchants from London in the Ulster plantation. It was a symbol of the final triumph of English colonialism over the Irish chieftains (Megastories).
1620 Puritans drew up the “Mayflower Compact,” agreeing to abide by “just and equal laws” framed by leaders of their own choosing.
1620 With the battle on the chalk slopes of White Mountain, a Bavarian Catholic army attacked Prague which was protected by the Bohemian forces under a Hungarian nobleman. Catholic army won and Protestantism was banned in all of Bohemia.
1628 Petition of Right (Great Britain)
1641 The Court of Star Chamber was controlled by the monarch and was so named because its seat was in the royal palace of Westminster in a room with stars painted on the ceiling. In the seventeenth century, the court was used by sovereigns James I and Charles I to suppress opposition to their authority. The court met in secret and dealt out excessive and cruel punishment. The Star Chamber was finally abolished in 1641 (Guy 1977).
1640-6 English Civil War partially in response to the imposition of the doctrine of the Divine Right of Kings imposed by Charles I and the Archbishop of Canterbury. English society was already individualistic, with less communal ownership and interdependency than in mainland Europe. In reaction to this state imposed system the Levelers insisted on rights that reside with individuals protected by a Lockean natural law. English common law, the Magna Carta and the Petition of Right protected individual liberty. Levelers denounced the Norman yoke which they claimed corrupted common law tradition.
1600s The Merchant Adventurers Company held the sole right for trade in textiles in England.
1644 “John Milton published his famous Areopagitica: A Speech for the Liberty of Unlicensed Printing, the work was illegally dispersed through the underground London printing network; its spread was a vindication of the very argument contained within. […] In 1695 censorship was allowed to lapse from the statute book, in recognition that it had become ineffective (Elliott 1989).
1648 – 1793 War of Kings: Westphalian Monarchical, Territorial States fought wars to expand
bureaucracies, armies, mercantalistic economic strength, territories (Ostergaard 1994). In 2000 the US advances the notion of “failed states” in international affairs, which provides a mandate for the sole remaining superpower to stage regime changes in any nation deemed a failed state in the world order of nation states that has existed since the Peace of Westphalia of 1648 (Liu 2002).”
1651 Thomas Hobbes Leviathan 1651 (Hobbes 1651[1996]) marks the beginning of Enlightenment thinking on human nature and society (Viner Role of Providence; Hirschman, Passions; and Myers). Hobbes’ argued that humans are natural enemies to one another because they are by nature, self-centred and materialistic. “solitary, poore, nasty, brutish, and short” (Hobbes quoted in Myers 32 cited in Rassekh 2002). The realist mode of thinking (statist logic of George Kennan, Henry Kissinger) is traced to the writing of Hobbes and later Machiavelli (Falk 2000a:22). – Thomas Hobbes Leviathan 1651 marks the beginning of the Enlightenment philosophers on human nature and society. (Viner Role of Providence; Hirschman, Passions; and Myers) Hobbes’ argued that humans are natural enemies to one another because they are by nature, self-centred and materialistic. “solitary, poore, nasty, brutish, and short” (Hobbes quoted in Myers 32 cited in Rassekh 2002:) Hobbes and Locke developed concepts of civil society as distinct from the state (Hobbes 1651[1996]).” Debates on small and big government related to the interface between civil society and state continue today and return to the Hobbes versus Locke debates of the Enlightenment.
1679 Habeas Corpus Act (Great Britain)
1688 The Glorious Revolution (Great Britain) was a bloodless coup d’etat in which the Protestant William of Orange was invited to become king to replace the Catholic King James II.
1688 The town of Londonderry, Ireland closed its gates to the Catholic James II who was fighting to regain the throne of England that he had lost in the ‘Glorious Revolution.’
1689 Locke enunciated the freedom to choose one’s belief system, “No one by nature is bound unto any particular church or sect, but everyone joins himself voluntarily to that society in which he believes he has found that profession and worship which is truly acceptable to God. The hope of salvation, as it was the only cause of his entrance into that, so it can be the only reason to stay there…A church, then, is a society of members voluntarily united to that end (Locke 1689).”
1689 English Bill of Rights (Commons 1689 [2002])
1690 Two Treatises of Government by John Locke outlines concept of natural law distinguishing between civil society and state; civil security and role of government, self-preservation versus laws made by the society to preserve society, laws of the society confine the liberty individual has by the law of nature (Locke 1690).
1729 Jonathan Swift published his ironic essay on a Modest Proposal for alleviating the misery of the impoverished Irish (Swift 1729 [1973]).
1744 The first person to propose a union of all the colonies and to propose a federal model for it was the Iroquois Chief Canassatego speaking at an Indian-British assembly in Pennsylvania (Weatherford 1988).
1755 On November 1 Lisbon, Portugal was hit by a devastating earthquake. The Roman Catholic Church claimed this was evidence of divine justice punishing the wicked inhabitants of the city. Enlightenment scholars like Voltaire rejected the claim of divine intervention arguing that the pious city would have been spared on a Sunday morning by a just diety, not destroyed.
1757 Edmund Burke published the “Philosophical Enquiry into the Sublime and Beautiful” (Burke 1757). Burkian empirically based theory of the sublime as fear inspired by nature, would become an integral part of Romanticism in the arts. Recent scholarship has linked the poetics of Romanticism with the politics of colonialism, Rousseau, slavery, the exotic Other, Orientalism. See Wordsworth, Coleridge, Novalis, Goethe (Persyn 2002). For Burke, “when danger or pain press too nearly, they are incapable of giving any delight, and are simply terrible; but at certain distances, and with certain modifications, they may be, and they are delightful. For a contemporary reading of Burkean sublime and Kant see (Vere 2001).”
1790 Burke, Edmund. (1790) Reflections on the Revolution in France (Burke 1790).
1762 Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1762) The Social Contract
1763 The Royal Proclamation directed that all lands for future settlement and development in British America must first be cleared of the “Indian” title by Crown purchase. The proclamation reaffirms First Nations’ rights to the land and resources, however, conditions are placed on the rights to hunt.” The Royal Proclamation was the defining document in the relationship between Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal people in North America (1763).
1773 “Edmond Burke prophetically recognized the first partition of Poland in 1773, (Burke 1755) as the beginning of the crumbling of the old international order. The principle of the balance of power had been historically invoked to preserve the independence of European states, to secure weak or small states against Universal Monarchy. Poland was the first nation in the European system to be partitioned out of existence without a war, a source of great satisfaction to the participating powers: Russia, Austria and Prussia. The event showed that in a world where great powers had risen, controlling modern apparatus of state, it was dangerous not to be strong. A century later, Africa, lacking strong governments, was also partitioned without war among the states of Europe. Furthermore, the partition of Poland profoundly altered the balance of power in Europe. Emerging Western European powers, such as France and England began championing the cause of Polish resistance and nationalism for geopolitical reasons (Liu 2002).”
1774 First Continental Congress (United States).
1774 U. S. Independence from Great Britain- Colonies won their wars with aid of Native American Nations.
1775 Official U.S. Indian Policy began when the Second Continental Congress created three Indian departments — Northern, Middle, and Southern —headed by commissioners who reported directly to Congress. Patrick Henry and Benjamin Franklin served as commissioners (Hirschfelder 1993).
1775-1781 American Revolution
1776 “As early as May of 1776, Congress had passed a resolution advising the colonies to form new governments “such as shall best conduce to the happiness and safety of their constituents.” Within a year after the Declaration of Independence, all but three states had drawn up constitutions.” (USDSO-IIP)”
1776 Declaration of Independence (United States)
1776 Common Sense by Thomas Paine
1783 “On September 3, 1783, American and British representatives signed articles of peace — the Treaty of Paris – – in which Britain acknowledged the independence, freedom, and sovereignty of the 13 former American colonies, soon to be states (USDSO-IIP)”
1784 Joseph Brant dictated Treaty of Fort Stanwick non-native claim to country by conquest (Submitted by Thompson, Carol. 2001. Akwesasne)
1789 The US Constitution
1789 French Revolution. The victors of 1789 founded a Constitutional Monarchy. Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen
1790 The Declaration of the Rights of Woman and Citizen by Olympe de Gouges
1791 The Rights of Man (1791-1792) Thomas Payne
1791 Bill of Rights of the United States
1791 Property ownership was the qualification for suffrage as outlined in Lower Canada’s Constitutional Act. Women were allowed to vote. Rosalie Papineau , the mother of Louis-Joseph Papineau was among the first women to vote. The Act was changed to deprive women of the vote.
1792 A Vindication of the Rights of Women by Mary Wollstonecraft
1792 In August of 1792, the Paris Commune, the local city government run by zealous Parisian revolutionaries held a violent demonstration which overturned the newly founded 1789 Constitutional Monarchy and denounced the Monarchy as enemies of the Revolution. The Parisian revolutionaries rejected the National Constituent Assembly and the first Legislative Assembly elected under that constitution. They called for National Convention to a write a constitution of a Republic. In the new constitution all men, not just the wealthier “active citizens” could vote for the electoral colleges that chose delegates. In reality the vote was controlled by the Jacobin leadership with leaders such as Danton declaring, “France is not republican. We can only establish a Republic by the intimidation of its enemies.” Danton justified the massacres during the Terror as necessary part of this intimidation. The National Convention did not fully represent public opinion in France. The more radical Montagnard Jacobins on the Left side of the National Convention under the leadership of Danton and Robespierre, took control over the Girondists on the Right.
1793-4 The Reign of Terror: The centralized Parisian anti-Christian, French National Convention was pitted against: the Royalists: Austria, Prussia, Britain and Holland; the Federalists who advocated decentralization, to limit Parisian centralized power especially the anti-Christian Parisian leaders; the Christian Democrats, representing, la peuple, the sans-culottes, men and women too who distrusted government and wanted radical changes. They claimed a democratic motivation which was a new use for the term. During the Reign of Terror, about 20,000 people died for being royalists, Girondins, federalists, or Hébertists, in other words urban radicals including Jacobin Montagnard Danton.
1794 The French Revolution was perceived as a secular religion of a dynamic minority that professed human equality, reason — and nationalism, equal partners in a great mission to create a better civilization free of slavery.
1793 – 1918 The War of Peoples or Nation-States began with the Atlantic-Democratic Revolution (Palmer 1959?) (Ostergaard 1994) R. R. Palmer asserts, “The war of kings is over; the war of peoples has begun.”
1794 The Jay Treaty is negotiated and completed. The Treaty asserts that First Nation People are not subjects of Great Britain and the United States and that First Nation People may pass borders unmolested. It was signed with Great Britain to avert a second war with the colonies. See contemporary First Nations artist Mcmaster.
1795 Johann Friedrich Blumenbach was a German anatomist and naturalist who established the most influential of all racial classifications, invented the name Caucasian in 1795, in the third edition of his seminal work, De Generis Humani Varietate Nativa. He claimed that the beauty of the people of this region was uncontested. Blumenbach’s definition cites two reasons for his choice–the maximal beauty of people from this small region, and the probability that humans were first created in this area. Mount Caucasus, is a mountain in the mountain range that straddles Russia and Georgia. Blumenbach believed that the autochthones of the Caucasian race (and therefore the human race) originated in this area in Georgia (Blumenbach 1775).
1788 One of the principal thinkers of ‘Strum und Drang’ , Goethe’s published on his travels in Italy. He was both fascinated and repulsed by the Rabelaisque Roman Carnival which he declared could not be written; it had to be experienced firsthand. Goethe’s work was profoundly influenced by the French Revolution, contemporary Weimar politics, his scientific research into plant metamorphosis, and colour theory. For more on carnival see Bakhtin ‘s 1940 Rabelais and His World in 1940 (Gardiner 1992:45; Goethe 1789).
1795 Kant’s Perpetual Peace (1795) a companion piece to the Critique of Judgment dramatically affected the contemporary German-speaking art circle in Rome. The painter Jakob Asmus Carstens and the critic Carl Ludwig Fernow, learned Kant in Rome in a politically charged atmosphere as Napoleon “liberated” Italians from the Austrians in 1800. Traveling artists supplied the expatriates with texts by Kant, which were read as complementary. Kant may have envisioned aesthetics as separate from politics (in addition to setting and time), but his short political book was read as a companion piece. For a discussion of this see Cheetham (2001).
1796 Bonaparte prepares to invade Italy from Nice to liberate Italy from Austrians. Bonaparte describes liberating army as generous enemies (Bonaparte 1796 [1947]).
1796 Seven Nations Treaty of Canada was signed. (www.wampumchronicles.com) (submitted by Smoke, Rena. 2001. Akwesasne)
1798 Napoleon successfully invaded Egypt which was part of the waning Muslim Ottoman Empire. This signaled the beginning of the end of the Ottoman Empire.
1800 Napoleon I (1800) “If I let the press do what it would like to do, I would be out of office in three months (Medialaw 2001).”
1800 Napoleon made Italy part of his empire. In 1814 Austrian, English, Prussian and Swedish allied forces defeated Napoleon. Italy was partitioned in 1815. In 1861 Italy was united under Garibaldi and Cavour into the Kingdom of Italy.
1806 At the Battle of Jena, Napoleon defeated the Prussian monarchy.
1814 The Times of London introduced the first steam-press (Keep, McLaughlin, and Parmar).
1800s The labour press began to publish describing a social landscape in which the rights to justice, equality and property of artisans, mechanics, trades people were impeded (Hackett and Zhao 1998:16).
1807 Great Britain abolished the slave trade.
1812 The war between Great Britain and the United States: by reason of hostilities the United States considers the Jay Treaty null and void.
1814 The Treaty of Ghent permited First Nation People to cross the border of Canada and the United States without being assessed duties on their “proper goods and peltries.” However, each government would enact legislation in respect to this treaty.
1816 Hegel (and Comte) depicted the accomplishments of the human mind — with its ultimate in the intellectual — as the pivotal force behind historical epochs. The state of Prussia in 1816 was the state of intelligentsia. Hegel proclaimed the end of history. The ideals of liberty and equality were to be imminently universalized. It was a victory of western ideals of freedom and equality embodied in a liberal democratic state (Brym 2001).
1812-1930 Bedlam, a ‘madhouse, was moved from Liverpool Street to Lamberth Street, London, in what is now the Imperial War Museum. In the 18th and 19th centuries Bedlam — like a public hanging — was considered to be a place of public diversion, entertainment or spectacle (Foucault 1963). In 1735 Hogarth made reference to Bedlam in an engraving that parodied the half-penny. It showed a demented Britannia with wild, flying hair – his country, he is obliged to tell us, has ended up in the madhouse (Hogarth 1735).
1815-36 The English working class used newspapers as a vital way of contributing to an unfolding class (Gregory 1999)consciousness (Hackett and Zhao 1998:27).
1820 Great Britain imposed a pact on Arab tribes on the coast of the Arabian Gulf.
1830s France occupied Algeria.
1832 Daumier was imprisoned for his lithograph of King Louis-Philippe as Rabelais’s gluttonous Gargantua forcing the starving masses to satisfy his insatiable need for wealth by placing all their valuables on a conveyor belt that fed directly into his cavernous mouth, as he sat on his throne excreting rewards and honours to the politicians below.
1834 Daumier’s lithograth Rue Transnonian, 15 April 1834 depicted the aftermath of a massacre of sleeping men, women and children in Parisian working class district. During a public insurrection a National Guardsman was wounded and his troop murdered all the inhabitants of the house from which the shots were fired (Gregory 1999).
1835 A jury acquitted editor/politician Joseph Howe accused of criticizing the authorities. The law of seditious libel was effectively struck down (Hackett and Zhao 1998:15).
1839 Britain occupied Aden, in Yemen, at the strategic entrance to the Red Sea as the Ottoman Empire crumbled. Aden was once part of the territory of the Sabeans.
1840s Both within and outside Europe, new civilizations were discovered. On the one hand the notion and fact of popular culture as an alternative to established high culture made its imprint from the 1840s (Ostergaard 1994).
1841 Frederick Douglass is invited to speak at American Anti-Slavery Society meeting.
1842 The Treaty of Treaties on State Lack of unilateral Authority to conduct Land Transactions.
1844 Marx published the Economic & Philosophical Manuscripts.
1845-51 One million Irish Catholics died and another million emigrated because of genocidal policies. In 1841 there were over 8 million Irish Catholics. The Irish famine is the most tragic historical example of the devastating impact, mainly on the most marginalized and disadvantaged, of protectionism and local monopoly of control over goods and services.
1845 Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass is published
1848 The Declaration of Sentiments sets the agenda for the US women’s movement.
1848 Communist Manifesto by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels.
1848 First Women’s rights convention. The early feminists who studied the moeurs of the Iroquois are: Matilda Joslyn Gage (1848); Elizabeth Cady Stanton (1848); Alice Fletcher; Laura M. Sheldon Wright; Erminnie Smith (Smithsonian Institute); Carrie S. Burnham. (submitted by Benedict, April. 2001. Akwesasne) Frederick Douglass attends first women’s rights convention
1851 Harriet Tubman, made numerous trips between the southern slave states and Canada conducting groups of escaping slaves to freedom.
1851 Mary Ann Shadd formed the Anti-Slavery Society in Toronto
1853 Mary Ann Shadd published The Provincial Freeman. She was the first Black woman to publish a newspaper in North America.
1850 – 1867 “Both the Leader and the Globe in their views of democracy expressed the central position of mid-Victorian liberalism. Both declared for a wide, popular electorate but still wanted a qualified franchise to recognize property and intelligence, and to prevent the rule of ignorance and mere numbers…. There was in this mid-century Canadian press little of the spirit of American Jeffersonian or Jacksonian democracy with their faith in the natural worth of the common man. 9”
1856 Dred Scott case: the Supreme Court decision.
1860s The Qillarsuaq family fled Pond Inlet for safety in Thule (Lynge 1993:32).
1863 Abraham Lincoln, the 16th President of the United States, issued the Emancipation Proclamation on January 1, 1863, declaring the freeing of slaves in all the areas then in rebellion against the U.S. (USDSO-IIP)
1863 John Stuart Mill published the first consistent exposition of Utilitarianism.
1860 The events of the 1860’s, rebellion in Jamaica and Ireland and agitation for franchise reform at home, and the critique of laissez faire associated with them, precipitated a transformation of Liberalism (Lee 1996).
1865 Jules Verne wrote From the Earth to the Moon (1865)
1866 Frederick Douglass meets with President Andrew J to discuss black suffrage.
1867 – 1960 “The federal and provincial legislatures had the primary responsibility for safeguarding human rights principles inherited from the United Kingdom (Holmes 2001:3).”
1867 A Russian Foreign Minister, Eduard de Stoekle, sold Alaska to the American Foreign Minister William Sweard for 7 million dollars (Lynge 1993:34).
1868 The Federal Government of Canada is given authority under Section 91(24) of the Constitution Act 1867, “to make laws for the Peace, Order, and Good Government of Canada,” including laws about “Indians and lands reserved for Indians.” (Mainville, Elmer and Flinders, Lori 2001)
1869 The Subjection of Women by John Stuart Mill
1869 On Liberty by John Stuart Mill
1869 “Ferdinand de Lesseps, with the backing of the French emperor, completed what would become, and still is, one of the key shipping arteries of the world, the Suez Canal.”
1871 The anthropologist Edward B. Tylor’s introduced the concept of primitive culture in 1871. The idea became popular through Tylor’s influential work and it entered the dominant discourse. Tylor set European civilization and western progress as the standard by which all others cultures should be measured (Ostergaard 1994).
1870 Manitoba Act of 1870 Indian Title. First Nations peoples were starving, demoralized, weakened by disease and plagued with alcoholism. White settlers arrived in increasing numbers. In the midst of despair natives began to speak of the Fifth Generation, a future time when there would be a rebirth of their people (York 1990:262).
1872 The Ontario Workman was founded. The labour newspaper expressed Enlightenment sentiments: “Co-operation is a principal that has shone upon the world through the progress of intelligence, and that it will gradually grow with the intelligence of the masses we have no doubt. It, or some like system, will gradually supersede the serf system of the past (Hackett 1998:21).”
1873-7 Economic slump in Britain as US industry expands.
1870 The unification and militarization of Germany.
1870s “A vignette in the Saturday Review, a popular English Victorian magazine, is typical of mid-century attitudes to race and working class life: “The Bethnal Green poor… are a caste apart, a race of whom we know nothing, whose lives are of quite different complexion from ours, persons with whom we have no point of contact…”(Malik 2001)
1871 George Chesney novel The Battle of Dorking (1871) predicted war in Europe as nations felt threatened by Germany’s unification and militarization.
1873 Intensive expansion of the Californian gold fields, the opening-up of Africa and Asia, the development of imperialism. Capitalism prevails as do Victorian values and social policy. In 19th century Britain, the State was either passive or punitive “prevailing contemporary interpretations of poverty and deprivation, and the diverse responses to them. Several key issues are enunciated: the division of responsibility for welfare as between the individual and the State; the sources of impetus for social policy formulation and the intervention of the State; the contradictory requirements of laissez faire and safeguarding the public good; the relative influence of morality and pragmatism in social policy formulation.” Victorian values
1870-1940 France is ruled under the Third Republic starting with Napoleon III. His minister, Baron Haussmann undertook urban renewal projects provided public parks, “widened boulevards lined with uniform facades, and brought the railway to the centre of Paris. Benjamin considered Haussmann to be an artist of demolition whose tranformations consisted in clearing urban areas of slum housing by moving the poor to the suburbs. Urban renewals were undertaken in the name of progress and Paris was the symbolic epi-centre of progress. Benjamin argued that there was indeed no real progress or change, only a rearranging of the old. Daumier also criticized Haussmann’s negative impact on everyday life in Paris as pedestrians could no longer easily cross the streets, and damp, dark basement apartments became infested with mushrooms.
1880 The Department of Indian Affairs is created to enforce the Indian Act.
1880s The US founded Knights of Labor was spreading across Canada. (Hackett 1998:28)
1881 The International Paris Electrical Exposition was held leading to predictions that the future would be dominated by science, technology and electricity. The America Thomas Edison’s Electric Company exhibited incandescent devices, a model of the Edison central-station lighting system showed an arrangement of incandescent lights within a complete electrical distributing system, including novel appliances and controls of the Edison system, and his first Jumbon generator which was “direct-connected” to its driving engine. Hammer exhibited the wax cylinder phonograph at the exposition (Harding 1881 [1986]).
1881 France occupied Tunisia
1882 Britain took control of Egypt.
1882 Thomas Edison’s central station on Holborn Viaduct in London began operation. Edison exhibited at the Crystal Palace Exhibition in London. He established companies in London and Paris to manufacture electric light system components and to install central stations in Europe and the United Kingdom. He established electric light companies in Latin America. He opened the Pearl Street central station in the Wall Street district of New York.
1883 Mount Krakatoa, in Java erupted killing 50,000 people and drastically contributing to global climate change for months after the explosion. The blast was heard around the globe.
1884 The Indian Act was amended to outlaw sundances, potlatches and thirst dances by the federal government. Prime Minister Sir John A. Macdonald called the potlatch a debauchery of the worst kind declaring that […] it and similar ceremonies encouraged barbarity, idleness and waste, interfered with more productive activities and generally discouraged acculturation. (Francis 1995)
1884 The Fabian society of Great Britain was founded by a group of upper middle class British intellecturals who promoted utopian socialist principles. Welfare state defined by Ferdinand Lassalle (1825-1864) in response to the growing social inequalities of liberal capitalism. Lassalle argued that the state should nationalize industries, redistribute national income, and provide social security. Prominent Fabians included Sidney and Beatrice Webb (1859-1947, 1858-1943), Bernard Shaw (1856-1950) and Harold J. Laski (1893-1950), Bertrand Russell, H.G. Wells, Sir Julian Huxley, Aldous Huxley, John Maynard Keynes. In America liberal ideals are similar to fabian socialism. John Dewey, President, Franklin D. Roosevelt, B.F. Skinner, Betty Friedan, Francis Crick, Isaac Asimov promote(d) liberal ideals. It was replaced by Keynes theories in the 1930’s.
1885 Sidney and Beatrice Webb, George Bernard Shaw and others published the Fabian Essays which was based on Bismarck’s Prussian model of bureaucratic planning and management for public welfare.
1887: “Nisga’a Chiefs travel by water to Victoria to discuss the Nisga’a Land Question. They are turned away on the steps of the legislature by Premier William Smithe (PWGS 2001).”
1889 “Aboriginal fishers are excluded from commercial fishing until 1923 (PWGS 2001).”